Saturday Scoop: The "Celebrating Work With a Break" Edition

The most noteworthy publishing news for the week.

Hey there! The Saturday Scoop is a roundup of publishing news that I found noteworthy over the course of this week, with some added but minimal commentary.

I’m also rounding up what has been going on in my newsletter this week. Did you know I don’t send everything out to my email list? Make sure you peruse the links to see what you might have missed!

This week I’ve spent a lot of time on calls—we had two huge webinars (replay links below) and I’ve been helping more consulting clients since opening my consulting calendar in late August. It’s been fun! But a marked change for me. I’m looking forward to Labor Day weekend in the US as work seems to be busier than ever these days. I deserve a treat!

On another note, I figured I should probably do a Labor Day weekend sale or something. So I’ve got a yearlong subscription to Author Analyst for 30% off, only if you grab it before September 5th through this button:

Another reason I’m celebrating: I recently hit 200+ paid subscribers on this Substack, and 100+ articles in the archive! I’ll be breaking down my numbers around that next week. If you have been wanting to join the Author Analyst community, this is a great opportunity!

You can also subscribe on a month-to-month basis at the regular price to lock in the current rates, as I am planning for a rate increase in October 2023.

Are you a part of the Author Analyst community yet?

The Saturday Scoop

• Five Opportunities You Might Be Missing in Publishing - We had a free webinar this week that focused on direct sales—launch crowdfunding, landing pages, subscriptions, web stores, and live events and signings—and it was a really fantastic conversation! We answered a ton of questions you had about direct sales in general, so if you are looking to learn more about the topic, you can now watch the replay or listen to the replay.

• Kickstarter’s New AI Policy Goes Into Effect (September 1) - I wrote a short update about the implementation of Kickstarter’s new AI policy and dropped it onto the Substack as a vignette this week. It’s focused heavily on the conversations I’ve seen across the internet and offers an overview of the reaction to the policy thus far, specifically from the author community. Since we don’t know much and won’t until we see the policy play out over the coming weeks and months, I won’t provide much more analysis until we have more data.

  • A big piece of news, if you don’t read all the updates, is Anthea Sharp also shared a post in Kickstarter’s help section this week that clarifies some of the challenges around it. Long story short, if you are an author and had issues with the Consent portion of the policy, good news—it only applies to developers and apps, not those who are simply using tools like Midjourney or ChatGPT. If you had issues with the Transparency portion of the policy…Well, not much has changed on that front since the announcement.

• IngramSpark Changes Minimum Wholesale Discount to 40% - Make sure you change your prices for your print book on IngramSpark if this affects you. “Certain booksellers and online retailers that purchase content through our wholesale distribution network now require that books purchased within the United States have a 40% minimum wholesale discount. As a result, IngramSpark’s minimum wholesale discount has been adjusted to 40% for the United States market effective August 31, 2023. Books enabled for distribution must meet the minimum wholesale discount levels outlined in the chart below or they may be removed from distribution.”

• Amazon Categories Have Been Updated - K-Lytics put out a new report (via email) about recent updates to Amazon’s categories. Alex Newton also has a new webinar outlining the major changes! I recently wrote a post breaking down Amazon’s category changes and how they have been affecting authors this year called Five Important Fallouts of the Category Changes at Amazon.

• Publishing Startup Beventi Launches to Streamline Book Signing Events - If you attend live events regularly and struggle to keep track of preorders and payments, there’s a new startup called Beventi that has taken the romance community by storm (though it is open to multiple genres). This startup comes from husband and wife team John Smythe (engineer) and Kadence Snow (author).

• How Authors Can Win the Future of Publishing—3 Keys - Michael Evans is one of the foremost thought leaders on subscriptions publishing (and frankly on direct sales in publishing). This week he dropped an incredible podcast episode called “How Authors Can Win the Future of Publishing.”

  • One of my favorite quotes is, “Direct sales is not about direct sales. Direct sales is about building your own network.”

  • Evans also talks about the addictiveness of retailer algorithms, saying, “How these retailers gain power is by being able to basically take the people at the top and give them very little transparency into why their business is actually at the top, and almost threaten them because any day the algorithm could stop recommending you—any day that next hit might not be a hit. And then the people at the bottom have this promise: they’re going to somehow jump to the top, right?” He goes on to explain how retailer algorithms actually work to keep readers within the retailer, and it’s spot on.

  • If you like what Russell and I talk about regarding wide, direct sales, and more, this episode is absolutely worth a listen!

• The Top 100 Fiction Authors in Subscriptions of 2023 - A new report is out ranking the top 100 fiction authors who are using subscriptions. This content is exclusive to the Subscriptions For Authors Facebook group (you must be a member to access the report) and this is only the first part of a a 3-part report on the rankings. I highly recommend checking it out if you are considering subscriptions—there is a ton of rich, curated research data that I know will be super helpful to authors!

  • One thing I noted most about this report is how many of these top authors—nearly all of them!—use Patreon for their subscriptions. Patreon, however, is not exactly the most author friendly tool (in my opinion) and not the best in space for most authors. (I personally prefer what Ream and Substack are doing, but to each their own.) To be 200% clear—I am not anti-Patreon and do not care at all if you love Patreon and will use it until your last breath. But if someone were to look at this list, they might think that Patreon was the only and ideal game in town for authors. Funny how that happens!

• What Surprised Us Most About Book Brush’s New Hourly Concepts Done-For-You Service - We spoke to Kathleen Sweeney of Book Brush this week about their newish service, Hourly Concepts, and she gave us a demo of the service live on the webinar! This service is ideal for authors who want affordable help with Kickstarter campaigns, book swag, A+ content, TikTok videos, advertising images and copy, interior page design (for print special editions), and more. Russell and I are now going to be booking for our next Kickstarter campaign, which neither of us wanted to do the graphics for…But really, we are also trying to figure out how much more we want to send to the service. Graphics are exhausting (for me at least) and the service is so affordable!

  • Watch the replay: https://writermba.com/bookbrush/

  • Listen to the replay: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2013629/13513850

  • Learn About Book Brush: https://bookbrush.com/

  • Book a Call With Kathleen: https://writermba.com/hourlyconcepts (limited spots!)

  • Hourly Concepts Portfolio: https://bookbrush.com/hourly-concepts-portfolio/​

  • Hourly Concepts Menu Prices: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QDje3701FiiIdfiQB3i-dj6Pkym5d9GH/view

Looking to Chat In-Person About Industry News Like This? You Should Come to the Future of Publishing Mastermind!

We’ve recently updated the Future of Publishing Mastermind website to include an incomplete list of speakers and attendees so you can see who else is coming.

Join us for the Future of Publishing Mastermind February 26th-29th at the gorgeous Hilton Riverside and hang out with speakers, vendors, sponsors, attendees, and us! We are headed to New Orleans next year with some of the best and brightest minds in publishing.

Please note: this is a private, premium event with many successful authors attending.

You can now see some of the people who are attending the event—we’ll share more announcements about who is coming soon.

You can learn more about the exclusive mastermind here and you can apply to be one of the attendees here. Tickets are more than 60% sold out!

If you’ve heard anything interesting in the publishing world this week, make sure you share it in the comments!